The Screwtape Letters review a hell of a disappointment

Park theatre, London
This adaptation of CS Lewis’s collection of sardonic letters from a senior to a junior devil is excessively and noisily theatrical

The big question is whether CS Lewis’s 1940 collection of letters, written by a senior to a junior devil, is suited to the stage. You can create drama out of epistolary exchanges, but Lewis makes it difficult by providing only one side of the correspondence. As if to over-compensate, this imported American version, adapted by Max McLean and Jeffrey Fiske and performed and directed by McLean, is excessively and noisily theatrical.

The letters give Lewis the chance to offer a sardonic running commentary on the temptations of the modern world. In advising his nephew on ways to win a wavering soul over to the devil’s party, the self-important Screwtape itemises all the possibilities. He writes about the power of mundane materialism, the petty snobberies of organised religion, the lure of novelty, the insidiousness of pride. This is the reverse of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus with its vision of grandiose temptations. Lewis, in one of his shrewdest aphorisms, suggests “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

How do you put all this on stage? It would be perfectly possible simply to have an actor reading the letters. This version goes to the opposite extreme. McLean, a large, bearded figure in a brocade smoking jacket, bestrides the stage like a Victorian actor-manager. He dictates to a scampering secretary, loyally embodied by Karen Eleanor Wight in devilish guise, who scribbles furiously and despatches the letters via an illuminated tube. For good measure, there is a background of death’s heads and periodic bursts of thunder and lightning. It is all too much.

The key to Lewis’s letters lies in their irony and their role reversal in which “Our Father Below” becomes a revered icon. But there is not much trace of subtlety in McLean’s performance. He colours every line. He vomits ostentatiously on the word “prayer”. When he refers to “all this talk about love”, he reacts as if being asked to swallow a poisoned morsel of meat. At other times, he smites the palm of his fist to emphasise a point.

McLean certainly creates a threatening figure. But it is a sign of the production’s bludgeoning approach that, when Screwtape invokes the use of sexual fantasy to create exquisite unhappiness, he rams home his point by holding up a pictorial biography of Madonna.

Given our theatre’s reluctance to tackle religion, there is room for a version of The Screwtape Letters. There are also moments when the force of Lewis’s language is felt. When Screwtape, referring to God and the devil says, “We are empty and would be filled, He is full and flows over” the antithesis strikes home. But, for the most part, the sinews of Lewis’s thought are obscured by the flesh of theatrical rhetoric. I found myself craving more simplicity, directness and faith in the power of the word.

At Park theatre, London, until 7 January. Box office: 020-7870 6876.

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